2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The underrepresentation of Latinx students in engineering and computer science across the pipeline – from undergraduate studies into the profession – remains a persistent challenge. Based on 2017 NSF reports, only 10.3% of engineering and computer science degrees in the U.S. were awarded to Latinx/Hispanics from 2004-2014 [1]. Similarly, a 2018 Pew report analyzing IPUMS data indicated that only 8% of the engineering workforce and 7% of computing, respectively, are comprised of Hispanics [2]. The present study utilizes an intersectional lens [3] to explore the professional identity formation and persistence of Latinx undergraduates in Mechanical Engineer/Computer Science (ME/CS) at a public, research-intensive university located on the US-Mexico border. Drawing on one year of intensive ethnographic data collection, this paper looks at a sub-set of nine ME/CS program completers to examine the key influences shaping their decision to pursue engineering/CS. The paper adopts a sociocultural framework for understanding students’ identities and pathways into engineering/CS education, contributing to a small but growing set of studies in this area [4], [5]. In particular, we draw on prior work in sociocultural identity studies in education to identify the identity resources [6] that help shape students’ decisions to pursue and persist in engineering. For the purposes of this paper, we focus on four of the most prominent sets of identity resources that emerged for this sub-set of students: affinity resources, aspirational resources, relational resources, and positional resources. We argue that the sociocultural focus on identity resources can provide an analytical lens for identifying and understanding elements of engineering/CS students’ academic and professional trajectories that enable or constrain their success in the major, as well as their subsequent persistence into and success in the profession. These findings, in turn, can help inform institutional recruitment and retention efforts to attract and retain Latinx in the field and profession.

Dr. Erika Mein is an Associate Professor of Literacy/Biliteracy Education and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and Educator Preparation at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her scholarship focuses on disciplinary literacies in postsecondary contexts, with a particular emphasis on engineering identities and literacies among English Learners and bilingual students. Her research has been published in journals such as Theory into Practice, Action in Teacher Education, and Journal of Hispanic Higher Education. She earned her Ph.D. in Reading/Writing/Literacy from the University of Pennsylvania and has been a faculty member at UTEP since 2008.

Helena Muciño is a Ph.D. student in the Teaching, Learning, and Culture program at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). She holds a master's degree in Musical Education Research from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is currently working as a Research Assistant for an NSF-funded project at UTEP dedicated to broadening the participation of Latinx students in higher education.